Presenter: Alexander Keese (Professor of African History, University of Geneva)

SNUAC Asia-Africa Center, with the Department of History at SNU, has invited Prof. Alexander Keese of the University of Geneva to hold SNU Africa Special Lecture on May 3rd. Alexander Keese is a professor of African history at the University of Geneva (Switzerland). He published the books Living with Ambiguity: Integrating an African Elite in French and Portuguese Africa, 1930–1961 (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2007) and Ethnicity and the colonial state: finding & representing group identifications in coastal West African and global perspective (1850–1960) (Leiden: Brill, 2016), and is the author of 27 articles in international, peer-reviewed journals, including on the history of decolonisation, ethnic conflict and forced labour in West and Central Africa. This lecture will be on the topic “Why does nationalist xenophobia beat ethnic sentiment in early postcolonial Africa? Lessons for identities in historical research”, and will discuss the politics and migration of contemporary Africa.